Collabshow.com

SharePointJoel.com is now Collabshow.com

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Joel Oleson

I’ve just completed the DNS update. There is still a lot of clean up to do to get all the redirects working right. The good news is… search works pretty well on the new platform. So if you landed here you should be able to find the post you were looking for… if not, please add it to the comments with the post id number from the URL. Guess what!?? Comments work!

Please join me in welcoming the new platform! I’m very excited to serve my readers better with a much more engaging platform. Excited to start Year 8 of blogging with a much improved interface!

Please update all your bookmarks and links to collabshow.com

Goals with my new blog!

1. Working comments with rich notifications for me, so we can really interact and engage in real conversations.

2. Better categories so it’ easier to keep the good stuff around for longer, and a much easier to use interface. I’d be really surprised if you don’t immediately see and experience the improvements.

3. Cool features. With all the plugins you’ll see the platform continuing to improve for your use. If you think something is missing let me know.

4. Community Calendar. I’m going to be a lot better at sharing where I’m going and when I’m doing webcasts and tons more about what’s going on in the community. I’m also going to find a way to make it very easy for all of you to interact here.

5. The engagements I have with vendors should make a lot more sense now. Technical content and blogs separate from vendor announcements and product reviews. The site should load much faster and have a richer interface.

6. Every post should have a picture, so it should be more interesting and better when sharing the content on twitter, facebook, linkedin, and more. I’ll continue to add better social integration features.

7. SEO, I know I already had pretty good SEO, but now it will even be better with better tags, URLs, topics, categories, and more… Much much easier to find my good content.

8. Bigger and better. You’re going to see me venture more into enterprise social networking and the evolution of MS to the Office 365 and Yammer cloud. More about why in my new job in the next post.

9. CollabShow – Yes. More industry content for enterprise collaboration.

10. Love it, like it. Let me know!! I plan to do webcasts on a monthly basis and try to find a platform that allows a real “SHOW” type of experience. I will continue connecting to the community and this will make it that much easier.

Do Consultants Really Matter to SharePoint Success? #Infographic

Posted on September 26, 2013 by Joel Oleson

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I recently spent some time with AIIM (Association of Information and Image Management the Global Community of Information Professionals) digging into their survey results to really understand if consultants make a difference in deployments. There surveys in the past have been extremely insightful into the state of SharePoint deployment and ECM usage. I was also really curious how many deployments out there are really successful. When I started digging in I found that the numbers were worse off than I thought. I knew that a lot of customers were struggling with budget and resources, and but ultimately discovered that the biggest issue is lack of expertise! While there are a lot that feel like they are just about there, the sad thing is more are struggling or stalled or failed in their deployments. People need help and they don’t know where to find it or they can’t seem to justify the budget to do it.

Four biggest issues: 1) Lack of expertise 2) Lack of Vision 3) Poor User Adoption 4) Lack of Governance

The high ambitions of SharePoint deployments often do result in SharePoint being used as a “glorified file share” and everyone is disappointed when that happens.

While it may seem obvious that experience is what is needed for true success, when analyzing the data AIIM survey revealed that you are twice as likely to be successful when you have the help of specialists, those experts who have been there before. I worked with AIIM on this Infographic to help make the data stand out from what was found in their survey from a little bit of data from both this years new survey and a little from last year. I hope it is informative to you as it was for me.

Experience matters!

Want to read more about this amazing survey from AIIM…

“AIIM’s new research “SharePoint 2013 – clouding the issues” looks at how SharePoint 2013 brings new capabilities but also a number of new challenges.

In this report, we look at the adoption rates for SharePoint as an ECM/DM system, and overall project success – or otherwise. We measure the adoption of SharePoint 2013 and the difficulties that users report with their upgrades and migrations. We study the impact of the new 2013 features, particularly on third party add-on products. We look at the take up of the 365-product family, and the issues that cloud presents for SharePoint users.”

Download the report from AIIM

Sharing The Point – Ecuador and STP Tour Wrap up

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Joel Oleson

Sharing The Point Colombia – Strong Community in South America

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Joel Oleson

SharePoint Community Guyana Launch #STPSA

Posted on September 5, 2013 by Joel Oleson

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Sharing The Point Guyana – The SharePoint User Group in Guyana

L-R Shiv Dindyal, Dave Kashrinandan, Michael Noel, Timmy Outstanding Velloza, Joel Oleson, Marlon Velloza, Kevon Gittens

If you would have asked me is there a SharePoint in Guyana. I would have done a search on my friends list in Facebook and Linked in and say I’m not really sure. When Michael Noel suggested we add Guyana to our list of stops, I was really cautious that we position Guyana as a small stop and not sure if anyone would show up. I was actually quite sceptical despite my belief that we should visit every country in the world and help build and promote community. Our mission has been to go to the places that are under served and ignored. We would be surprised once again about the power of community and friendship.

When we start planning a Sharing The Point event we often start with no contacts. That was the case with most of our events in Northern South America. For Venezuela we did know Elias who was very positive about the community in Venezuela and Colombia. Andres in Colombia was an awesome connection and he helped us connect with the community there in a big way. They have a great user group and we knew with the support of a couple of MVPs we potentially bring on Microsoft, which we did. In Guyana Microsoft had no real presence. Any accounts in Guyana are covered through Trinidad.

It was looking bleak after I was doing a search on Facebook of “friends of friends who live in Guyana and like SharePoint” and I was coming up with nothing. We had a Bob Smith sign up for 3 slots, but we weren’t sure if that was someone just messing around. I sent a few messages to folks who had SharePoint in their profiles on Linked in, but was getting no response from the 17 or so that had SharePoint listed in their profiles.

The Birth of The SharePoint Community in Guyana – This is what Friendships look like being formed

Jim Bob Howard is amazing at finding people. He’s got magic when it comes to finding people who are interested in connecting with us. We’ve aligned with Jim Bob as an official Sharing The Point Community Builder and Connector. When he helped us connect with Marlon we struck gold. Marlon was a real find, he’s got incredible passion and extremely friendly and sincere. Marlon was friends with Kevon and his cousin Timmy was still in school and was very interested in learning about SharePoint and getting career advice. Before long we had 10 people registered and real seeds to the start of a community in Guyana. With this lunch meeting we met some amazing people and we had an amazing exchange of ideas and information on SharePoint, careers, jobs, travel and more. What happened was powerful. It was the start of the community in Guyana. Afterwards, Marlon and Kevin went with us to see different parts of the city including where the president worked and you could see their pride in the city. They really wanted to help improve Guyana. It was exciting to see their passion. I’ll share my travel stories in my travel blog at http://travelingepic.com

Hanging out at Kevon’s house with Marlon and me. No greater honor than being invited to someone’s castle. Huge respect. Great meal of sweet curry casava and a bag of “bomb” an amazing shake made of out natural ingredients.

Above: Elvis an Amerindian from the Arawak tribe. We visited his village right after we met him at his fresh coconut stand.

Some people think there’s little value in the community building trips we do to Timbuktu, but I can tell you right now, that traveling and connecting with people who feel disconnected, lost, or that they don’t matter… it changes lives. People that don’t understand the value in seeing community building only need to talk to any one of these folks to see what it means to them to have representatives from the SharePoint community visit them… in their town.

I tell them the satisfaction is mine, but I know we’ve planted seeds of hope and have made connections that last a lifetime.